It’s been quite an exciting month at Timescale for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest initiatives we’ve tackled is the third annual State of PostgreSQL survey. With approximately 45 questions about the community experience with PostgreSQL, helpful tools, best practices, and more – there are so many great insights that will help to encourage and build a stronger community.
If you haven’t already, would you please take 10 minutes to complete the survey and add your voice? All of the data will be anonymized and provided freely to the entire community in a few weeks. Your additions will add even more value!
Although I can’t share any specific insights about the survey yet, there are a few things that have caught my attention to share with you and hopefully build a little anticipation. 😉
Community is Sweet! (and so is 🐝 beekeeping 🐝)
Wait, what? How is beekeeping related to the Postgres community and the yearly State of Postgres survey?
Well, first off, I’m an amateur beekeeper and if you are around me for much time (or watch my Twitter account), you’ll hear me talk about bees for sure.
But, as responses have been coming in over the last three weeks, it’s been fascinating to see how folks use PostgreSQL – including some tools that I had never heard of before.
- Psql ✅
- PgAdmin ✅
- DBeaver ✅
- Intellij IDEA ✅
- Beekeeper Studio ⁉️
Sure enough, out of the many suggestions of tools that folks use, it was hard for this one not to grab my attention. Maintained by Matthew Rathbone, Beekeeper Studio is an IDE that he’s been working on for a few years. Although he’s not a beekeeper (😢), his early interaction with Apache Hive seems to have given birth to a lot of beekeeper (data) products. Fun to know!
To be honest, without the results of this survey, I don’t know if I would have heard of the tool (sorry Matthew!). But I love that others do know about it and wanted to share.
What about you – is there a specific tool you use a lot and love that others need to know about?
Languages, languages, languages!
Sometimes, I need things like this survey to remind me that the world is a bigger place than my experience. Sure, it seems that nearly every developer on the planet uses either Python, Javascript, Go, or Java to access their Postgres data. I have to admit, however, that I was a bit surprised to see a few other languages mentioned by folks, including:
- Delphi
- Clojure
- GDScript
- Pascal (again ⁉️)
- Perl
When I see responses like this, it reminds me that there is so much diversity within a community like ours – many of us trying to solve similar problems with different tools.
What about you? Have you been working on some research data using Pascal? 😉
Features, features, features!
For one final glimpse into some of the cool things we’ll learn about the Postgres community once all of the data is in – let’s talk features! Developers love the plethora of features that PostgreSQL has to offer and they use many of them in their daily work.
- Common Table Expressions are 💯 and many respondents seem to use them often
FILTERclauses for aggregates, a feature that’s not available in every database, are more popular than I expected! 🔥TABLESAMPLEis known by more people than I would expect, even with folks that only have a few years of experience using Postgres! 😎
In short, Postgres development is driven by community needs and contributions. It’s evident that most of the major features (even relatively new ones) are known and loved by many in the community. 🎉
Will you add your voice, too?
There are so many other interesting insights we’re going to be able to glean from this data. Your answers, and your voice, will help us finish strong with all of the best insights possible!
We’ll take a few weeks to crunch the numbers and provide a beautiful report of our findings, but we’ll also make all of the data available for anyone to slice and dice as they see fit. We think there’s a lot for the community as a whole to learn from this data and can’t wait to learn together!